


stalemate

by regim0n_z



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: High School Memories, Homophobic Slurs, M/M, References to Chess, nerd supremacy!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28861659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regim0n_z/pseuds/regim0n_z
Summary: Nathan wants Charles to teach him how to play chess. For some reason or other... Not like he really cares. Chess is dumb.
Relationships: Nathan Explosion/Charles Foster Offdensen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	stalemate

The thought first occurred to him one day when he was stampeding his way through household appliances in Offdensen’s office. The reason why he wouldn’t remember after a few hours. But whatever it was, it was something his manager wouldn’t contest. Charles sat at his desk, unphased. Didn’t ask what was wrong, didn’t look up from his spreadsheet. Just allowed Nathan to reach the completion of his temper tantrum on his own. At his own pace. The neglect pissed him off more.

Old lamps? Smashed. Antique vases? Smashed. Old and new stuff, stuff that wasn’t in his office last time he was smashing things. Smashed. Stuff Offdensen probably bought just for him. Smashed. Porcelain, aluminum, the paper-thin glass of antique light bulbs. Smashed, crushed under his boots. Stomped into the stone floor, rubbed into the manager’s nice carpets. Felt good. Cathartic. Way better than talking about his feelings, like Offdensen always suggested he do. But he was the one providing the breakable objects, wordlessly giving Nathan the permission to be as destructive as he wanted. Honestly. This man really knew what he needed.

Now the destructive forces inside of him had been just about quelled, and he was feeling alright, pretty good even. Might’ve turned around and thanked Charles for the session, if his side didn’t collide at hip level with something as he was doing so. The sound of dozens of little objects slamming into the floor broke into his senses. Stone-sounding, not the sound of breakable glass, like he preferred. And when he looked to his feet, he saw littered around him clusters of little carved statues laid around his feet and his path of destruction. White and black. Fallen from the checkerboarded table he had knocked into.

“Wha…” Nathan grunted, staring at his feet. “What’s that.”

“That’s my chess set,” Offdensen said without having to look. “I suppose you could break that as well. But… I’d prefer if you didn’t do that.”

Nathan kicked one of the pieces away just to see what sound it would make. It was heavy for its size, only skirted along the stone and didn’t bounce, until it collided into another piece with a clank, and rested there. Wasn’t that exciting. “But I could still break it? Like, if I wanted to?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t stop you. No.”

Barring making that decision for now, Nathan instead reached down to pick up the same piece and examine it inside his fist. Only now could he read its shape from its black ebony. The piece had a small square base, and was topped with a small, intricately carved horse, the edges of which stabbed into his palm. The horse’s mouth was open terrifyingly wide so that its individual teeth could be seen. Like it was squealing in pain. From being stabbed or something. Kind of brutal, honestly. By far the most interesting thing in Offdensen’s office, since he was always stocking it with ugly, brightly colored things, floral patterns, that kind of not-brutal stuff. Stuff Nathan would feel justified in smashing. But he might’ve felt bad about breaking this. It was kind of nice.

He glanced back at the table it had fallen from. It really was cornered in the darkest, dustiest corner of the office and tried to think, was this always there before? Had he avoided breaking it until now? Never rampaged that far, he guessed. Never even noticed there was a table there. A single cobweb stuck from the walls to its surface, covered in that black-and-white checkered print that was popular in the 90s. He wouldn’t have pegged Offdensen for being that guy, but that’s his choice he guessed.

Carefully, he returned the ebony mare back to its home on the board, and because he (might have) felt guilty, began picking out the rest from the piles of glass they were mixed amongst. One by one, he replaced them in their face-up position, all in one big cluster. Black and white together, because he didn’t see what order they started in. 

Finally, Offdensen looked up to admire his gesture. Finally, something got his attention. Even just two seconds of it.

“Ah… Thank you, Nathan,” he said curtly. “I’ll have to... _reset_ those on my own, after I’m all finished here, but… Know that I appreciate the effort.”

Nathan frowned, gazing down at his shoddy work, and he began to realize he knew next to nothing about chess or chess boards, other than having seen them in a movie or on an album cover or something once or twice, or why his manager would keep one of them in his office. But he wanted to know. Wanted to know why this totally un-brutal guy would even own a set of these brutal little statues, what purpose they served, if he could get one too... He looked back to Offdensen, still stoutly immersed in his work. Showing no opening for conversation whatsoever. He tried forcing it anyway.

“So…” Nathan attempted casually, acting as if he hadn’t wrecked the man’s office minutes ago. “You play this? Or…”

But his lead didn’t go anywhere. Offdensen’s lips remained pressed in a thin, uncompromised line, eyes somewhere else. He was in the middle of penning something down when Nathan asked, so the singer stood there and waited, feeling obtuse and awkward and having a hard time remembering why he had been here, smashing things. Offdensen finished his paragraph, set his pen to the side a little too properly and stapled something to the document, and only after he stored it away in his desk, but not before producing another from the same drawer, did he finally respond to the question.

“I do. Or, used to, I should say. These days, I don’t really find the time for it. Too much Dethklok business to attend to. You know.” 

Charles peered away from his work just a moment, long enough to follow Nathan’s slow gaze back to the board and the deep creasing of his brows that followed.

“The set is more of a keepsake now. From my, ah, chess club days. Back in high school.”

A memory pinged. Nathan examined his manager, then the board again, then his manager again.

“Chess club… Oh yeah. I know what that is,” Nathan crooned. “Used to beat those guys up. Uh… the ones at my school. The chess club, at my school.”

Offdensen nodded to him, eyebrows raised thoughtfully, but only gave Nathan the second of attention before reigniting his inked assault on the newest stack of papers. “Right,” he said. Again, without looking.

“Didn’t really get what that was about. Like, what they really did. In the chess club. They were just nerds. So I beat them up.”

“They play chess,” Charles said. “In the chess club.”

“Yeah, but like…” Nathan paused. Searching his memory. “Don’t know what chess is. Don’t get what it’s about,” he repeated.

“Well. You played on your school’s football team, didn’t you?”

“Yeah…”

“If you can imagine it, chess and football are similar games in the sum of their parts. Both games require facing off against an opponent, quick thinking, and creating strategies on the spot. Chess can even get quite competitive, actually.” 

Charles accented this with a loud, _snap!_ , staple. 

“The main difference is that, as opposed to utilizing feats of strength, as you would have done playing football... a chess player utilizes feats of the mind. That is to say… logistics, mathematics... Brains, not brawn.”

Nathan stared down. “Oh,” he grunted. Trying to imagine what a football game would look like going down on that tiny board. Didn’t that exist already? Like, foosball? No… That was soccer. Or… European football. Whatever…

“Still don’t get it…” he continued, hanging his shoulders but not moving from the spot, too lost in the conversation to decide if he should let it continue or make his exit now.

“That’s alright. I don’t really expect you to,” Charles was saying, through suddenly stacking even more papers, papers Nathan didn’t even see him produce.

“Why not.”

“Well… And I mean no harm by this Nathan, but, ah… I’m not sure it’s really suited for you. Chess is more of a logician’s sport. You might find it boring,” Charles said.

Huh. That sounded familiar. 

And though Charles may not have seen it, a memory played back behind Nathan’s eyes, of a small nerdy kid, with his trousers pulled up too high and glasses too heavy to be perched on his weak nose, saying something similar to him. Though with a little more nasal, a little more venom. And him breaking those glasses into that nerd’s face a second later. Leaving a bloody nose.

Didn’t remember how he’d gotten in that situation in the first place. Just that it’d happened.

He didn’t remember caring about it that much anyway. Not in the beginning. It was the older boys on his team that had groomed him with the mindset that there had to be a hierarchy in their high school, just as their seniors had for them, and a generation of seniors before that. Probably dating back to the viking days, he’d always thought. It was just so damn important in their small town. And being the elites themselves, he was always told, it was their responsibility to upkeep a certain legacy of tradition. That meant, fucking the girls in the cheer squad, really specifically the popular ones, and not the ones in the marching band. Not even if they were hot. It meant always pushing yourself past your limits, whether it was drinking more than the guy next to you, doing more pushups than the guy next to you, getting more teeth knocked out than the guy next to you. And it meant keeping the bottom-rung of the school in check. That meant beating them up. And that included the chess club. Who was Nathan to dispute that when they were so punchable anyway?

He didn’t always have to throw the first punch. They disliked him by default, loved to highlight the difference between their intellect. They called him “oaf”, “dimwitted”, “imbecilic”, “brainless”, all the other fancy words for “stupid” their genius brains thought up. He called them “faggot”. Intellect wasn’t good for shit when you were trapped inside a locker.

One time he’d been so pressed, so immensely pissed off, he chased one of those chess club assholes down across the entire campus before tackling him. Broke the kid’s leg. And he got away with it too. ‘Cuz his coach had argued for him, that the principal was “discriminating against athletes”, and “ruining the team’s good reputation” trying to get him expelled.

Charles stayed fresh in his mind as the memory played out, maybe because he was transfixed watching the man staple his way through a novel of financial reports in the present. Maybe because his revelation had thrown him in such a loop. That Charles, _his Charles_ , had been in high school once? That he had been in the chess club? A nerd? Like… what if Charles had been there back then? What if under that designer suit he was wearing the typical poindexter getup? If he had protruding braces or too-heavy-for-his-face glasses, if he was half Nathan’s size and happened to block him on his way to the locker room. Would he still throw the first punch, if it was Charles?

He probably… probably couldn’t… Maybe if… No... But the scene continued on from there, without his permission. Nathan’s fist half-escalated in the air. Stuck there. And Poindexter-Charles, Chess-Club-President-Charles in the middle of the hallway, with his textbooks shoved into his chest and hands in fists, staring him down defiantly, even halfway nearer to the ground than he is. No one is here to witness the standoff, but the stakes feel high anyway. 

_Well? See the way he’s looking at you? Disrespecting you?_ , he hears coming from no where in particular. _Are you gonna teach this nerd a lesson, dumbass? Or are you gonna be the laughing stock of the town?_ Like it was coming out of the lockers. Their lids flapping open and shut like laughing teeth. Everything in the world trying to tell him _step forward. Punch, kick, stomp. Bloody nose. Bloody lip. Steal money. Buy booze._ He doesn’t budge.

Charles sidesteps him eventually. Just walks straight down the hallway cocky, unbothered. All teeth in tact. Calls him a “dumb gorilla,” on his way out. It’s only a whisper, but it rings inside Nathan’s ears like a jet taking off. Feels like his head might explode. _Checkmate_. And he’s knocked off the board.

No one else was here. No one saw it happen. So why does it bother him so much? No one knows except him. Charles doesn’t even know. He’s not paying attention. He’s too busy flipping through paperwork. Going staple crazy.

So Nathan awkwardly grumbled something out about needing to check his email, or water a plant, or he forgot something on the stove, or whatever, and whether Offdensen heard him or not didn’t matter. He was hauling away from the office quickly, before those nerdy, albeit slick and stylishly framed eyes could look over him any more.

Nathan stepped into the elevator and froze. Really froze, and asked himself for the first time. Was he dumb? Was he just a big, dumb asshole? Did all his friends think that? Did they think he was dumb, and stupid, and a big stupid asshole and all those other words, and did they talk down to him like he was dumb and he didn’t even know?

Did Charles?

The thought melted through his constitution like molten steel. Through his old belief that he was the one running things around here, big and strong and domineering and in charge. That wasn’t true at all.

It was a nerd that was running his life and his financial, that kept this giant fucking roof over his head and held his band together. It was a nerd that he relied on for everything. Couldn’t cook for himself or file his own taxes or even tie his own boot laces right anymore. A nerd managed the people that put food in his mouth, the people that got on the floor and tied his shoes for him. What had he done for the nerds? Broken their noses, broken their legs, called them faggots, called chess gay. His teenage self was too stupid to have this kind of foresight, and… Had he even really grown since then?

Probably not. Oh god.

Less than a week passed before Charles saw Nathan stalking around near his office again. He didn’t barge in like he’d do if he was drunk or in a bad mood, which was good. Just hovered. Silently, until he was allowed in. But Charles would keep a mindful watch on him regardless, in the case that changed in a second.

Nathan sunk into the seat at the base of his desk just as silently, weighed down under the mess of black hair that shielded his features from being read. So like usual, Offdensen continued his work, allowing him the time to sit there and stew, or speak first if he felt like it. Nathan’s temperament was delicate; he didn’t like the colloquial feeling of someone stepping on his toes.

There was no indication of that happening this time. So Charles took the first step. “Something bothering you?” he asked.

Nathan stirred in his seat slightly, his only feature visible a deep frown.

“Yeah. Sorta.”

“And what’s that?”

The silence returned. But intentions sat heavy in the air.

“Do you think I’m dumb?” Nathan asked suddenly.

Charles stalled, and in a rare moment, he set down his pen and looked Nathan head on.

“Now, why would I think that?” he asked.

That wasn’t an answer.

“Cuz... Maybe I’m dumb?

“I think you’re incredibly talented. Talented at writing, talented at making money…”

Still wasn’t an answer.

Nathan hung his head, refusing to look anywhere other than the floor, even as Charles examined him thoroughly. A minute passed of just silence, just the two breathing and the ticking of some vintage cuckoo clocks Charles had procured in his most recent antique haul, all stored in the usual corner should Nathan require them.

Charles was first to break the silence when he hummed to himself, folded his hands out onto his desk and leaned in closer. All ‘professional psychologist’-like. “So, where is any of this coming from?” he asked. And when he didn’t immediately get a response, he tried again. “Did one of the boys say something nasty to you? It’s okay. You can tell me.”

“Nah,” Nathan grunted. “They didn’t call me dumb. It’s more like, you... You just make me feel dumb.”

Charles’ brow creased a speck. “Do I? How so? I promise, it is, ah... not intentional.”

Nathan grunted again, this time his eyes cascading elsewhere, darting all around the office, staring at everything there was to see except the man in front of him… Degrees, certificates hanging on the wall, the stupid plant in the corner, the golden CFO nameplate at the end of his desk, the crystal decanter, half full. Probably filled with brandy. In its warped reflection, he could see the outline of Offdensen’s only slightly concerned face. Eyes completely concealed behind two opaque squares. 

“You’re just… You’re a nerd… I used to beat up nerds ‘cuz I thought they were so dumb. But back then, I didn’t realize how dumb that was really gonna make me look... You know?”

“Ah. This is about the, ah… the chess club thing.”

“Sorta. Yeah.”

Offdensen readjusted in his seat. “Look, if you’re harboring any guilt after that last conversation we had, it’s not necessary. What’s past is past. And ah, I surely hold no ill will towards you.”

Nathan didn’t respond. So, again, he continued.

“Besides, I am slightly older than you. We would have never gone to high school together, and I would have never been one of the nerds you beat up. If that’s any consolation.”

“It’s not,” Nathan said in a low rumble. 

Offdensen rested a hand under his chin. “No?”

“No. I’m still dumb.”

“You feel dumb. That doesn’t mean you are,” Offdensen corrected. “You’re experiencing a cognitive distortion. Simple, ah… psychology stuff... So. Is there anything I can do to fix that?”

“Yeah,” Nathan said flatly.

And Charles was only slightly surprised that he had come here prepared with a solution, not just intending to mope in his office all day. Only in the way that he always expected to be surprised by Nathan.

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“You can teach me how to play chess. Or like, whatever…” Nathan said, his sentence slowly disappearing into nothing. “I want to like… learn how to be a nerd, so we can be equal partners… Like, for business purposes… I guess...”

Charles simply stared back with his eyebrows raised. Processing a rare question he hadn’t expected to have been asked. But after a second, and following Nathan’s frame melting further into his seat, he thought it over and he nodded. “Alright. I suppose I could do that. If that is what you really want.”

“Yeah, it is…” Nathan said, words still trailing. Still having a staring contest with that dumb plant. “Why? You think I’ll be bad at it? Or...”

“I don’t think that’s up for debate. I think you can succeed at anything you set your mind to,” Charles sighed, as he began meticulously returning each object on the top of his desk to their respective places. “Whether or not you’ll… _enjoy_ it and want to _stick with_ it is another question. But-”

A massive fist suddenly slammed into the opposite end of his desk, throwing his stapler and his fountain pens into the air before he had the chance to stop them.

“I can enjoy chess! I can like nerdy shit too!” Nathan howled, fist down like a gavel.

“Of course,” said Charles. Halfway from the floor to fetch his supplies. “I admire your passion. I just hope you’ll, ah… watch your hands... at the chessboard... Might cause too many resets.”

Nathan paused, suddenly self-conscious of his fists, and slowly retracted them from the desk and stuffed them back into his jean pockets. His momentary passion dissipated into nothing, and he returned to silently hanging his head, awkwardly staring at the floor and frowning.

And now, with not much left to say to him, Charles was met with an immovable Nathan. Probably too slumped to want to leave without further reconciliation, probably too stubborn to leave if he was asked nicely. No other way to really remedy the situation other than to give him exactly what he wanted. Right then. Right that moment. Barring any work he might have yet to finish.

So he gestured back to the darkest and dustiest corner of his office, where the freshly set and dusted chessboard awaited them.

“Shall we, ah, get started then?”

And Nathan’s eyes immediately lit up. At least, what was visible of them.

“I’ll let you decide which side you want to play on.”

“The one with that horse,” Nathan said, searching the board for the same ebony mare he’d met with earlier. The one gnashing its teeth, ready to take a bite out of its enemy. Eat its guts and shit. “This.”

“Well, Nathan. Both sides have their own horses. That’s the knight piece. You get two.”

“Oh,” Nathan groaned, then said under his breath, “Then I guess I’ll take the black one. Black is more brutal.”

**Author's Note:**

> my first fic of the metalocalypse series. thanks for reading, enjoyed writing this one.


End file.
